The greatest crisis facing us...

Hi, everyone :),

I am going to postpone the second half of the encyclopedia thing for a groundbreaking speech I read.

"The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom Bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia" - which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want mat be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.
Call it the crisis of the Librarian.
We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. (n) We need a new science to be a perfect secretary to all other sciences."

Who wrote this? David Lynch? Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin?
Nope

Robert A Heinlein in 1950 in a piece originally called "Where To?". In this piece Heinlein makes several predictions or extrapolations about the future. It was repeated as "Pandora's Box" in the book The Worlds of Robert A Heinlein published by Ace Books, New York in 1962. In the 1962 version after twelve years of thought and history had gone by he amended some of his predictions but this one remained the same. Then in 1980 it was again reprinted by Ace Books in Expanded Universe Robert A. Heinlein as "Where To?" (pp 317-371). He again had the opportunity after thirty years of reflection and history to revise his statements. Many of them were changed but this one was not. In his list of the forerunners of these "synthesists" that he makes in 1965 he mentions several job titles but does not include librarian as one of them.

In Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson, Bantam Books Paperback 1993 (p107) we read:

"The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish,
silverhaired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing
a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely
woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened,
the sleeves pushed up. Even though he’s just a piece
of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move
through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the
Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a
vast web of cross references"

The "librarian is a piece of software that programs itself.
In her article I Librarian Hilda Kruger described "Having an agent methodically crawling the Web, gathering the information you’ve specified, is a bit like having a full-time reference librarian residing in your PC."
(INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2005 p124).
She talks about these Intelligent Software Agents (ISA) burrowing into our lives but we are way beyond that I have two different types of agents downloaded as add ons to my FireFox browser.

One is "Clearforest Gnosis" http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32 its function is to:

ClearForest Gnosis uses advanced natural language processing techniques and ClearForests’s Semantic Web Service (SWS) to
extract meaning from the content of any web page.

With a single click, Gnosis will identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing. Using the built-in navigation sidebar you can gain immediate understanding of the page’s contents.

The other is "read4me" XUL http://read4me.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

"Client front end to read4me server. read4me is a Python feed-reading web service. It reads RSS or atom feeds and, using Bayesian statistics, reports how much you will like the articles. This project includes a server and a Firefox extension client."

Then I organize it all with Zotero

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources:

- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages

- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages

- Flexible notetaking with autosave

- Fast, as-you-type search through your materials

- Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags

- Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services

- Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)"

In her abstract Kruger says "One of the main concerns of this paper is the continued relevance of information professionals as infomediaries in our future society." Maybe it has already gone from continued relevance to no relevance? Out of all of these books and articles being written there is a way forward offered in "Snow Crash" The Librarian states:

"I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code. He devoted himself to sifting through vast amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of information."

The hero of the story "Hiro Protaganist" replies "So he was kind of a meta-librarian." Is this our path? most of these projects including the two browser add ons I described are either open source or accept help from others in their development. The whole point behind Web 2.0 and Opensource software and publishing, is group participation. Do we follow their lead? It appears that the direction our profession has been to try and impose upon the web and its users, meta-data and proprietary databases and it was the wrong direction. Maybe it is time for a radical new direction. Maybe it is time for meta-librarians as programmers? If we can't take the lead in these new projects maybe we can at least make a valuable contribution.

Lets talk it over and I will make a list of new job duties for the meta-librarian and get back to that encyclopedia mess.

R Philip Reynolds